Item — HN Reader

Food is extremely dense in energy. 1 food calorie is about 1.1 Watt-hours. A hamburger is about 490 Wh. An AI model requires 0.047 kWh = 47 Wh to generate 1000 text responses.[1] If an LLM could convert hamburgers to energy, it could generate over 10000 prompt completions on a single hamburger.

Based on my own experience, I would struggle to generate that much text without fries and a drink.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/24066646/ai-electricity-energy-watt...

1 comments

During that time, your brain would do far more than just that text generation though, beyond what we even know scientifically.

But yes, food energy could be useful for AI. A little dystopian potentially too, if you think about it. Like DARPA's EATR robot, able to run on plant biomass (although potentially animal biomass too, including human remains):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energetically_Autonomous_Tacti...

AI is more energy-efficient than a human doing the same language-generation task is my point.